In celebration of International Women’s Day (8th March 2013), I think a reference to computing pioneer Admiral Grace Hopper is in order. I believe she said that programming was like planning a dinner; that’s a neat way of mapping the act of programming into something everyday. After all, as a programmer, most of the time you aren’t inventing new algorithms1 you’re just joining up existing third party libraries and API’s in a different way; making a new recipe out of the same ingredients.
Integration is much the same.
To paraphrase Bill Gates, anyone who’s understood all of of Knuth can always get a job. ↩︎
Bridging between SAP and other systems using the adapter framework; part 3
So, this is yet another blog post about executing BAPI functions in SAP using the Adapter Framework; one day I will get bored with writing about SAP, but right now, it’s on the top of the heap. Today’s post is around error handling and reporting; any monkey can make something work, but handling error conditions gracefully is often a stumbling block that can trip you up during integration.
Are you an expert developer if you’ve had n years experience?
I re-watched groundhog day quite recently; it is still a work of genius but it got me to thinking about the subtext of the film and how it relates to software development.
Bridging between SAP and other systems using the adapter framework; Part 2
Last time I wrote about how easy it was to execute an arbitrary BAPI using the adapter framework and get meaningful results back as XML. At the simplest level, that’s pretty much all you really need to integrate with SAP. Unless…
Bridging between SAP and other systems using the adapter framework; Part 1
SAP R/3 is used in a lot of enterprises and so having to integrate with SAP R/3 is something that we familiar with. The adapter has a broad range of support for SAP R/3; we can send and receive IDocs if you are trading documents electronically, or we can invoke arbitrary RFCs/BAPI functions within SAP R/3 if IDocs aren’t your thing.